COLLECTIVE MEMORY, SOCIAL TIME AND CULTURE: THE POLISH TRADITION IN MEMORY STUDIES

摘要

In Poland, research into collective memory has a long tradition and clear cultural perspective. The author's aim is to show that this research tradition, which is deeply associated with the legacy of the Durkheimian school, was very strong in Poland in both the prewar and postwar periods, especially in the work of Stefan Czarnowski, the only Polish member of the school. In this perspective, social memory is closely connected with culture and time. In the first part of the paper, the author explains why the relations between social memory, culture, and social time are important for evaluating the Polish research tradition. The second part is dedicated to the works of Stefan Czarnowski, who started the cultural stream in Polish memory studies many years ago. The third part presents the idea of social time, and the relations between the sociology of time and memory studies in Polish sociology. The specificity of Polish studies on collective memory is little known today, especially to foreign researchers, but the tradition is worth remembering.%This paper concerns research studies on collective memory in Poland. These studies have two characteristic features: a long research tradition and a clear cultural perspective. The research tradition is much longer than polls on collective memory, which go back to the 1960s and are identified with sociologists like Barbara Szacka, Andrzej Szpociński and Piotr Kwiatkowski as successors of Nina Assorodobraj-Kula's ideas. It is a tradition deeply associated with a Durkheimian legacy, which is very strong in Poland both in the pre-war as well as in post-war period. The well known book by Maurice Halbwachs, Les cadres sociaux de la memoire (1969 [1925]), and works of other Durkheimi-ans, among them, Stefan Czarnowski, were for many decades the main source of inspiration and ideas concerning social memory and its functioning. In this perspective, social memory (collective constructions and representations of the past) was closely connected with culture (i.e. with culturally and socially differentiated ways of thinking and ways of acting with patterns, meanings, values and rituals) and with social time (qualitative, concrete, value-oriented ways of representing change, duration, succession and simultaneity). Social memory was approached as a cultural phenomenon and dimension of social time. These two categories, culture and social time, which are seen as important factors in collective memory studies conducted in Poland, are the object of this paper.